Sequoia Capital Hires Its First Female Investing Partner in the U.S.

Sequoia Capital, among Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital firms, has hired its first female investing partner in the U.S.

It only took 44 years.

Jess Lee, who was most recently the CEO of fashion shopping site Polyvore is joining the venture capital firm, whose investments have included Apple, Google, PayPal, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Lee will start her new job on Nov. 7, according to Bloomberg.

Lee became CEO of Polyvore in 2012, after joining the company in 2008. At the time, Lee was a product manager at Google but became fascinated with the young fashion site. In July 2015, Polyvore announced it had agreed to sell to Yahoo. Yahoo CEO Marisa Mayer was a mentor of Lee at Google.

Sequoia began courting Lee in 2012 after partners Roelof Botha and Alfred Lin saw her speak at a tech conference that year and were impressed, according to Bloomberg. When Yahoo acquired Polyvore, Sequoia asked her to join the firm, but Lee declined, saying she felt loyalty to Polyvore’s employees and Mayer. Discussions picked up again this past spring and she finally accepted. Yahoo is in the process of being acquired by Verizon, likely creating extra incentives for Lee to move on.

Lee’s hiring is also notable because Sequoia partner Michael Moritz drew a wave of criticism when he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV last year that his firm would like to hire female partners but isn’t prepared to “lower standards” to do so. Moritz, a former Time magazine journalist, went on to lament the lower numbers of women studying math and sciences as the reason why it’s so difficult for the firm to hire more women—a popular excuse often used by the tech companies with low diversity numbers. Sequoia already has female investing partners in China, but none of them are at a senior level in the U.S. Soon after the blunder, Moritz added that “there are many remarkable women who would flourish in the venture business.”

In May, Sequoia added Mike Vernal as a partner after the departure of Michael Goguen, a longtime partner who was sued for sexual assault.

The 9-year-old company is best known for letting users create online fashion collages from the site’s vast catalog of items or by uploading their own. Polyvore’s catalog is also shoppable, often serving as a way for users to discover new items to purchase for their wardrobe. The company touts its powerful search engine for images and its ability to recommend items based on the heaps of data it has analyzed from users.

According to the company, menswear has been a highly requested category from its user community, so it decided to roll out it out during New York City’s men’s fashion week, which ends later this week.

With that said, Polyvore has more than 20 million monthly active users, a number is hasn’t publicly updated since 2012, and currently 84% of them are women, according to its site. This begs the question of what exactly does the company want to accomplish through this new category. Constructing collages or even simply searching for men’s apparel and shoes will surely appeal to some of its female users, but does Polyvore hope it will attract more men to its service?

That’s hard to tell. As we’ve seen with Pinterest, a digital service also centered around creating digital collections of items, shopping, and generally searching for images, attracting male users to these services is still a challenge.

For more on Polyvore, watch:

But there is hope. In July, Pinterest marketing partner Ahalogy released the results of a survey which found that men now make up 18% of Pinterest users, a 5% jump from the previous year. Moreover, almost two-thirds had joined in the past year, making them the fastest growing group on the service.

And attracting male users may not even matter to Polyvore.

When asked about its goals for the category, a Polyvore spokeswoman told Fortune that the company is “always looking for new ways to delight our users and help them give and get styling inspiration from our global style community,” reiterating that it’s responding to a demand from users, both men and women.

The company also pointed to a 2015 study by research firm IbisWorld that found that online sales of men’s clothing grew by 17.4% on average every year between 2010 and 2015. The study also projects that the category will see average annual growth of more than 14% over the next five years, which Polyvore views as an opportunity.

Polyvore’s Jess Lee on Why She Sold to Yahoo

Earlier this year, Yahoo bought fashion e-commerce site Polyvore for $230 million, making it one of Yahoo’s YHOO largest acquisitions in 2015.

Founded in 2007, Polyvore lets users create sets of items that others can buy through the site. The company also built a visual search engine that’s intended to be a better way to search for clothes, handbags and accessories. By 2012, it had more than 20 million users and was helping drive business to retailers. It’s also developed a range of products, largely centered around advertising, and has a long-term goal to become the first stop for any fashion purchase, whether the customer is in the research-and-planing phase, or ready to buy.

At the time, the deal was said to bolster Yahoo’s “MaVeNS” — or mobile, video, native, and social — numbers, which CEO Marissa Mayer has made her new focus. The acquisition closed in September. Jess Lee, Polyvore’s CEO, sat down with Fortune briefly to talk about why she sold to Yahoo, what’s the future for Polyvore and more.

Fortune: Why did Yahoo make sense as an acquirer?

Lee: For Yahoo, on the consumer side of things, buying Polyvore was about investing in the lifestyle category. The company has learned that content and community can be a powerful thing, as shown by Yahoo Sports and the ability to incorporate news, premium content, fantasy sports and more. It’s same formula for fashion. On the business and revenue side, Polyvore has 400 advertisers. The site has already integrated our ads into the Yahoo native advertising network [called Gemini] and the goal is to expand that even further.

What can we expect from Polyvore in the near future?

We’re working on a lot of things for mobile. Polyvore has a lot of room to grow on mobile. We are also going to do more within the fashion community as well.

What about commerce?

Conversion rates for people to buy via mobile for retailers are generally low. This is an area we believe is ripe for disruption and we will be looking to help brands and merchants improve their conversion rates. We won’t hold any inventory, but we do see an opportunity to help retailers increase sales on mobile.

How Polyvore CEO Jess Lee got started

When Jess Lee was a product manager at Google in 2008, she would often unwind in the evening by playing around on Polyvore, a fashion web site that allows users to create shareable collages of clothing and interior designs. Her mentor at the time was a Google VP named Marissa Mayer. Lee couldn’t have known that seven years later, she would be CEO of Polyvore and would sell the company to Yahoo, now led by her old Google colleague.

When Jess Lee was growing up in Hong Kong, she assumed she would end up going to art school, since she loved reading and drawing comics. “But Asian parents don’t really like that,” she tells Fortune, only half-jokingly. “They told me they wouldn’t pay for art school, so I picked a more traditional path.”

She headed to Stanford to study engineering. When she marked down computer science as her planned major when she applied, she knew next to nothing about the subject. But it turned out to be love at first sight. By her senior year, Lee had a job offer to be an engineer at Intuit, “working on QuickBooks or TurboTax or something,” as she recalls. At the eleventh hour, a recruiter from Google called. It was 2004, and the company was super-hot, but much smaller than it is today, and still known primarily as a search engine. The recruiter told Lee about Google’s associate product manager (APM) program. She responded by asking, “What’s a product manager?”

Lee got the answers to that and to many more of her questions at her job interview with Google, and through the interview process she met Bret Taylor, who went on to become CTO of Facebook, and Marissa Mayer, who later became CEO of Yahoo. Both would prove to be key mentors to Lee throughout her career.

Mayer became a sounding board for Lee even before the Stanford grad began at Google. The new college grad was nervous, she says. Her mindset went like this: “I have to be on a team; I’m pretty antisocial. I don’t know if I can do that. And I have to design product instead of just doing engineering and coding.” She shared her fears with Mayer, a Google VP and fellow Stanford grad, who gave her advice that Lee has never forgotten. Mayer said that when she had had to decide between two things, the best choices in her life had been when she chose the more challenging path. Lee went for it.

Lee first worked on Froogle, which was Google’s shopping engine. After a short time, she moved to Google Maps, where she was one of only two product managers (the other handled local search) and felt true ownership over a product. Then she began working on a project called My Maps, which gave users drawing tools and location pins so that they could create their own maps. Soon, at only 23, Lee was running My Maps with five other engineers. This intimate group was passionate and eager to come in to work each day, which Lee says was the key to the project going so smoothly. “It was like a startup within the Maps team,” she recalls happily. “We were testing new things all the time. Everyone was so excited about the potential of the project, and because of that, everyone was so much more productive.”

By 2008, Lee was spending a lot of her free time in the evenings using Polyvore, which had been around for a few months but was not yet widely popular. It was a mix of everything she loved—art, technology, and fashion. Pasha Sadri had come up with the idea in 2006 when he and his wife were remodeling their house. He co-founded the company with Jianing Hu and Guangwei Yuan, software engineers he knew from when he worked at Yahoo.

That same year, Bret Taylor, who had left Google to focus on his startup FriendFeed, approached Lee about coming to work with him. Lee met Taylor and his co-founder, Jim Norris, for coffee. But FriendFeed seemed to her like something Facebook could copy all too easily. (And in fact, Facebook later acquired FriendFeed, primarily to bring in Taylor, who would become its CTO.) Lee was hesitant to join FriendFeed, but the meeting got her excited about startup life.

When she walked out of the coffee meeting with Taylor and Norris, Lee happened to look across the street and noticed a small corner store called Pasha’s Market. A funny coincidence, she thought: it got her thinking about Pasha Sadri, whom she had never met but whom she knew as a friend of a friend (and Polyvore shared an office with FriendFeed). When she got home from work that day, she sent Sadri an e-mail with unsolicited, extensive feedback about his site. The e-mail, which Lee shared with Fortune, is pretty blunt. She politely introduced herself (“Nice to meet you!” she began, adding a smiley-face) before getting down to brass tacks by instructing Sadri, “loading images in search results is slow,” “I want image rotation,” “could you add a lightweight way of bookmarking items for future use,” and “ ‘Fgnd’ and ‘Bgnd’ are confusing … ‘Send to Front’ or ‘Send to Back’ would be more user-friendly.”

Sadri wrote back and invited Lee to meet him for coffee. They clicked, and by the end of their chat he was asking her to come work with them.

Click to buy the book. Photo: Brad Barket/Getty

Lee joined Polyvore as a product manager. Her thinking was that, like Google, it would be a sink-or-swim environment and she would learn a lot so that eventually, she could go do her own thing. But soon, she says, “Polyvore kind of became my own thing.”

The site made all the fixes she had suggested in her e-mail and then, under her guidance, cleaned up other areas as well. Lee loved the simplicity of Polyvore and wanted to keep it strictly focused on its strength: the “sets” editor and the strong community that used it.

In 2010, Sadri, Yuan, and Hu approached Lee and told her they wanted to start recognizing her as an official co-founder of the company. Lee was wary. She wasn’t a founder, she reasoned, because she hadn’t been there from day one. The trio told her that she had joined in the company’s first year, she was its first hire after the three founders, and she had begun focusing it right away. As far as they were concerned, she was having as big an impact as they had by creating it.

Lee acquiesced, though she is aware that some might question the title. “I always feel a little bit weird about it, so when anyone asks, I try to explain that I’m like an honorary co-founder,” she says. Indeed, some critics are quick to point out that Polyvore wasn’t Jess Lee’s idea—that credit goes to Sadri. (A splashy 2010 New Yorker feature on Polyvore quoted Lee extensively, and arguably introduced her to the tech world.)

As the Polyvore staff grew, she and Sadri fell into a partnership where they were essentially running the company together. In 2012, Lee and Sadri decided that the CEO role was evolving: It had previously been all about building the product, Polyvore.com, but it needed to shift toward building the company, Polyvore Inc. Sadri and Lee switched roles: She became CEO, Sadri became CTO.

That May, a user on the Q&A forum site Quora posted a question asking, “Why did Polyvore remove Pasha Sadri as CEO and replace him with head of product Jess Lee?” Sadri himself posted a reply: “As we grew beyond a product/engineering team into other functions, we decided to swap roles so we could spend our time on things we are each best at. I now get to spend more time on product and technology. Jess oversees other functions in the company, something she is great at.”

Thinking of Apple as inspiration, Lee soon led the charge to kill off a number of features, even some that were performing well. Her first cut was the site’s “Ask” section, which allowed users to solicit and give out style advice. Some users were sad to see it go; one of them took to Quora to ask why Polyvore was shutting it down. “It was by no means an easy decision,” responded Sadri. “Decisions about what not to do are just as important, if not more important, than decisions about what to do/keep.”

In January 2013, Lee and Sadri made further simplification a companywide initiative by sending an “all-hands note” that asked every single person at Polyvore to come up with a list of everything he or she worked on. “Our goal is to get the company into its simplest possible state,” Lee wrote. “I’d like every team to make a list of what work you do on a regular basis. Identify what is most impactful to the company. Then figure out what to cut.”

That e-mail about cutting features may sound like the kind of missive that would scare employees and cause anxiety, but Lee says she was happily surprised by the team’s reaction. “It also signaled that it’s okay to fail sometimes, like if we built certain features and they aren’t working out, that’s okay, as long as we get rid of them,” she says. “Many companies talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. It takes active effort and an investment of time to go back and delete things.”

In 2012, Lee expanded the company’s geographic reach by opening an office in New York City. One month after opening the Manhattan office, Polyvore treated a small group of 12 active users from all over the world (including France, Chile, and Brazil) to a trip to New York for a night out with Lee and the community managers. “We told them, ‘Guys, you mean the world to us, and without you guys there would be no site,’ ” Lee says.

The CEO still loves to draw and read comic books, and is grateful for the continued mentorship of women like her mother and Marissa Mayer. She gives back to the community of women in business in quiet ways, behind the scenes. (She does not love public speaking.) At a Women 2.0 conference in 2013, she signed on not to speak, but to mentor at the lunch. She volunteers at “women in tech” events outside of Polyvore and always has her eye on which women at her company seem as though they could run their own startups one day. “I make sure they know that I think they could do it,” she says. “And I try to make myself helpful to them, like if they have ideas, or if they want to get a better sense of how the business works.”

Polyvore has also attracted attention for its corporate culture. On Halloween, the company holds a costume contest in which groups dress up according to a theme and then decorate one of the conference rooms. On Lee’s 30th birthday, in October 2012, her co-workers all dressed in exactly what she wears every day—combat boots, black jeans, and a black top with cutouts—and it took her until the end of the day to finally get the joke.

Now Lee will rejoin her mentor Mayer at Yahoo (the price of the acquisition was not disclosed), where she’ll work to incorporate Polyvore’s products—and unique culture—into the larger ecosystem of the purple giant.

Yahoo goes after fashionistas with acquisition of Polyvore

After buying up the teen haven Tumblr in 2013, Yahoo is going after fashionistas. The tech giant has acquired Polyvore, a company best-known for letting its users create collages of outfits, beauty, and lifestyle items.

The two companies announced the deal on Friday; financial terms were not disclosed. Founded in 2007, Polyvore has become a force in the e-commerce world through its visual collages (Polyvore calls them “sets”) of items that users can purchase through the site. By 2012, it had more than 20 million users and was driving significant social commerce to retailers. It’s also developed a range of products, largely centered around advertising, and has a long-term aim to become the first stop for any fashion purchase, whether the customer is in the research-and-planing phase or ready to buy.

But perhaps what really made Polyvore a winner is that it built a search and discovery engine for fashion and lifestyle items, something that’s key in those categories but traditional engines like Google weren’t serving well (and arguably still aren’t), as Matrix Partner’s Dana Stalder, who led the firm’s investment in Polyvore in 2009, tells Fortune.

So the move by Yahoo is about tapping into Polyvore’s revenue hose through e-commerce. Expect the company to also use Polyvore to beef up Gemini, Yahoo’s new native advertising network. The deal will also help bolster Yahoo’s “MaVeNS” — or mobile, video, native, and social — numbers, which CEO Marissa Mayer has made her new focus. In the most recent quarter, the MaVeNS category brought in $399 million in revenue, up from $249 million a year ago, and now representing 35% of Yahoo’s traffic-driven revenue.

The acquisition reunites old friends — Before Polyvore CEO Jess Lee joined the fashion site, she worked for Mayer at Google and has called her a mentor. In addition, three of Polyvore’s co-founders were former Yahoo engineers. In 2012, Lee made Fortune‘s 40 Under 40 list.

Stalder also shared that while Polyvore wasn’t looking to sell — it’s been profitable or nearly almost every quarter — another public company approached it with talks of an acquisition, which ultimately led to Polyvore’s deal with Yahoo.

As part of the acquisition, Polyvore’s teams will join Yahoo’s offices in Sunnyvale, San Francisco, and New York City, and Lee will report directly to Yahoo SVP of publisher products Simon Khalaf. Though Polyvore’s product will continue to operate on its own, some of its technology and presence will be integrated into Yahoo’s fashion and lifestyle properties.

Polyvore has raised a total of $22.1 million in funding from Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Harrison Metal, and others.

(The story has been updated with comments from Dana Stalder, partner at Matrix Partners, one of Polyvore’s investors.)

Are we in a tech bubble? Silicon Valley says ‘yes’ and ‘no’

With startups fetching valuations as high as $18 billion, one persistent question remains: Is cash-laden Silicon Valley in the throes of another bubble? Fortune sought out five tech folks at last night’s 40 Under 40 party in San Francisco on Thursday night for more insight. Their answers may surprise you.

Marc BenioffCEO, Salesforce.com

“It’s not a tech bubble. It’s the biggest wave of innovation in the history of the world. It’s a combining of unbelievable forces of cloud, social networks, mobility plus connected products.

A great example of that is Apple Pay, which I’ve been using today. I went to Walgreens, I put my phone right up against the Verifone receiver, and I did a transaction on Apple Pay. Apple Pay is an amazing new platform. It’s going to help create new companies. It’s going to create a new wave of infrastructure investments where all the point-of-sale systems are going to have to be replaced. And then it’s a huge accelerator for Apple.

You can just think of that as a metaphor happening in our industry for something that one day doesn’t exist, and the next day it does and how it can change everything. Everything is changing, and there’s never been a more exciting time.”

Joe GebbiaChief product officer and co-founder, Airbnb

“It’s all cyclical, right? Just take a look at the stock market over the last 60 years. There’s a cycle involved. But we’re not in a tech bubble because companies are making revenues. And I think that was a major difference between what’s happening right now and what’s happening 14 years ago. Companies today are making real money.”

Jess LeeCEO and co-founder, Polyvore

“I do think we’re in a bubble. There are too many companies with no business model or no sustainable business model. I’m proud that we have one, but I think there’s going to be some kind of correction.”

Jay SimonsPresident, Atlassian
“I believe there’s a lot of optimism in the market right now. Whether there’s a bubble or not a bubble, I believe people are just optimistic. Look at the fact that the PE [price-earnings] ratio is the highest it’s been since 1940 with the exception of 2000.”

Josh TetrickCEO, Hampton Creek

“I don’t. I think a lot of things are overstated on the good and the bad. And I think it’s just human nature to get excited about things and to get too depressed when it looks like something. Eventually, there will be a downturn, but I don’t see it coming any time soon.

I think from my perspective and what we’re doing, I think there’s so much noise about there being a bubble. But that [any sort of course correction] is more likely than not to be a year-and-a-half off. And that’s a result of all the customers we’re dealing with from Wal-Mart to Target to Whole Foods and just trying to get a sense of how they’re thinking and just understanding their environment. Feels like it’s a bit off. But it’s not now.”

20 Great Workplaces in Tech

The tech sector is still sexy — and has an abundance of dreamy jobs. These companies have perfected balancing tough, technical work with fun and friendly cultures.

There’s no shortage of perks at the world’s best tech employers — free food, massages, on site medical centers — the industry is jam-packed with employers who offer lucrative pay and enviable extras. A new study from the culture experts at Great Rated!, the workplace review site from Great Place to Work, names some of the best-in-class employers in and out of Silicon Valley. Here are 20 companies that are attracting and retaining today’s top talent in tech.

*Revenue figures are from the most recent fiscal year and headcount figures are the latest supplied by the company. Visit the Great Rated! links for full workplace reviews.